In The Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms,
Mary Ann Wimsatt argues that Border Beagles, the sequel to the
scandalous Richard Hurdis, shows Simms as continuing to explore the
contentious relationship between the older, civilized tidewater south and the
wild trans-mountain frontier.[1]
While thus continuing a theme begun with Guy Rivers and Richard
Hurdis, Border Beagles saw Simms decidedly scaling back
the violence found in those two books, especially the latter. Here, the
author’s presentation of the chaos and dangers of the frontier is tempered by
humor, with ...

Early in the
morning of 7 November 1825, in the town of Frankfort, KY, a young lawyer named
Jereboam O. Beauchamp crept to the house of the state attorney general, Solomon
P. Sharp, and stabbed him to death. The
murder was orchestrated to avenge the honor of Anna Cook[1],
Beauchamp’s wife, who as a single woman had been seduced, impregnated, and
abandoned by Sharp[2]. The event was a national sensation
immediately following its discovery and Beauchamp’s capture days later. Following Cook and Beauchamp’s failed joint
suicide attempt and the latter’s subsequent execution, ...

Building
out of his early experiences with writing in the psychological gothic mode in
such texts as Martin Faber (1833) and
Carl Werner (1838) and anticipating
his later work Castle Dismal (1844), William
Gilmore Simms published Confesssion; or, The Blind Heart in 1841. Coming at the front of what many consider to
be the author’s most productive period, this novel is the extended confession
of Edward Clifford who is orphaned at a young age and sent to be reared by his
aunt and uncle in Charleston. Rising
above his foster parents’ scorn, Clifford becomes a lawyer, a prominent
citizen, ...

Eutaw,
published by Redfield on 19 April 1856, is the sequel to The Forayers,
and the penultimate romance in Simms's Revolutionary War saga[1]. It completes the story of the British withdrawal
from their outpost at Ninety-Six, including the battle of Eutaw Springs, the
last major engagement of the Carolina theatre, and its aftermath. Simms’s biographer John Caldwell Guilds notes
that it is necessary to understand Eutaw as a sequel, as it was “not a
new venture but the extension and completion of a scheme which kept expanding
in the author's fertile imagination.”[2] ...

Guy Rivers was published by Harper & Brothers in July 1834 as the
first of Simms’s many fictional frontier writings known as the Border Romance
series. According to the author, these works were “meant to illustrate the
border & domestic history of the South.”[1] Writing to James Lawson in December
1833, Simms described the novel as “a tale of Georgia—a tale of the miners—of a
frontier and wild people, and the events are precisely such as may occur among
a people & in a region of that character.”[2] Mary Ann Wimsatt notes that Guy
Rivers established ...

Richard Hurdis, the second of Simms’s
Border Romances (following Guy Rivers
of 1834), presents an intriguing study of the author’s development, as its
publication history illustrated Simms’s notorious sensitivity to critical
reception. Hurdis came out during a worrisome time in Simms’s life, with his
second wife, Chevillette Eliza Roach Simms, severely ill while pregnant, and
the writer’s relationship with his publisher, the Harper Brothers of New York,
souring. John C. Guilds notes that
“alternating moods of depression and optimism—lifelong traits—soon became
dominant ...

Originally
published by Wiley and Putnam in two volumes—the first series in October 1845 and
the second in February 1846—for the Library of American Books series, The Wigwam and the Cabin is a collection
of border stories about the southwestern frontier. Simms best summarized the collection in a
dedicatory letter to his father-in-law for the 1856 Redfield edition: “One word
for the material of these legends. It is
local, sectional—and to be national
in literature, one must needs be sectional. No one mind can fully or fairly illustrate
the characteristics of any great ...